How to pick a colour from anywhere on your screen
The pipette beside the hex field in Paint by Zaweba samples any pixel on any monitor or in any app, with a magnifying loupe and a hex readout.
Picking a colour from anywhere on the screen works through the pipette next to the hex field in Paint by Zaweba. Click it and you can sample any pixel on any monitor, including other programs, web pages and videos, with a loupe that magnifies the area and a hex readout of the colour under the pointer. Click to set it as your foreground colour, hold Alt to send it to the background instead, or press Esc to cancel.
It's the fastest way to match a colour you can see but don't know the code for: a brand colour on a company's website, the blue in a screenshot someone sent you, or a shade from a reference photo open in another window.
Step by step with screen sampling
Open the colour controls and find the hex field. Click the pipette beside it. The pointer becomes a sampler with a loupe, and as you move it across the screen the loupe shows the pixels under it enlarged, with the hex value alongside. Move to the colour you want, over any window or any monitor, and click.
The colour becomes your foreground colour and its hex code is in the field, ready to copy into a web page, a document or a message. With Alt held, it goes to the background colour instead, which makes it quick to pick two colours in a row.
Picking accurately
Zoom the source if you can. Edges of text and shapes are blended with the background by anti-aliasing, so a pixel right at the edge is a mix of two colours. Pick from the middle of a solid area. The loupe helps here, since you can see exactly which pixel is under the pointer.
Photos are trickier, because each pixel varies. Within your own document, the Eyedropper tool can average an area of 31, 51 or 101 pixels, and sample the current layer or everything below, which gives a truer idea of the colour of a patch of sky or skin than a single pixel would.
Other ways to read colours
The Colour Sampler tool places up to ten points on a picture and shows their values in the Info panel, and they update as you edit. That's handy for checking that a white stays white while you colour correct, or that two halves of a panorama match.
If you want a whole set of colours from a picture rather than one, Palette from Image picks 2 to 32 colours from the image or a selection and puts them in your swatches.
Mistakes to watch for
Screens and colour management can play tricks. A colour picked from a web page is the colour your screen is showing, after any colour management by the browser. For brand work, ask for the official codes and use the pipette as a check rather than the source.
Night light settings and screen filters shift what you see but not the colour of the pixels, so sampling still reads the true value. Even so, judge colours with those filters off.
Saving what you pick
Add picked colours to your swatches so they're kept. Swatches export to .css and .hex for web work and to .ase, .aco and .gpl for other design programs.
Paint by Zaweba is free software for Windows that runs offline, and the screen pipette is always there in the colour controls, so you don't need a separate colour picker utility.
